Talking exclusively to SciFiNow about his role as creative consultant on Fox’s superhero stable, Mark Millar revealed that although James Mangold and Hugh Jackman‘s The Wolverine was already well along in the development process when he signed up, the clawed mutant’s second sold adventure is looking pretty good.

“When I got this job they’d started shooting a couple of weeks,” explained Millar, “but the screenplay to The Wolverine is really, really terrific – I’m really, really delighted with it. Obviously the casting’s all be really good, the director’s brilliant – James Mangold.

Whether the break with the wider X-Men universe in favour of the standalone, Frank Miller/Chris Claremont vibe of The Wolverine, is any sort of cause for concern is quickly dismissed – in fact it’s to the strength of the character that Logan is able to sustain solo adventures, independently of the wider X-Men story.

“Oh, absolutely,” Millar agreed. “I’ve no worries about it at all. You know, I wrote the Wolverine comic twice – I did the Old Man Logan story and Wolverine: Enemy Of The State – and I don’t think it detracts having individual Wolverine adventures from the X-Men. He’s like a lone wolf character, he disappears and does his own thing sometimes and then he comes back and hangs out at the mansion, so it does feel quite natural to for him to be in these movies.

“You don’t want to have him out there all the time, because I think if you’ve got him in X-Men and Wolverine movies and they’re all running at the same time, it’s a little bit too much but as long as you’re smart with it and there’s a lot of other characters to explore as well. The X-Men universe is about the same size as the Marvel universe in terms of the number of titles it sustains at any one time, so there’s a ton of stuff to play with there and a lot of characters I’d like to explore there too.”

What this means for Logan’s appearance in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past is anyone’s guess – is Hugh Jackman’s role another cameo, albeit meatier, or will this be one of his “smart” deployments in the current X-Men franchise?